Phemie Keller

For hours Mrs. Basil Stondon lay in that merciful stupor.

While tender and pitying hands dressed the child for his long sleep, dressed him all in white and left him on his little bed—while the servants went about the darkened house with quiet tread, and asked one another under their breath what their master would say, and whether they should all be dismissed, and if an inquest would have to be held—while the few remaining leaves on the elm trees fell one by one off the bare branches—while the late autumn day drew to its close—Georgina still lay without speaking a word, without moving hand or foot.

By her side Phemie sat thinking, not so much of the miserable mother or of the dead boy, but rather of what Basil would say—of how Basil would feel.

Once she went halfway down stairs intending to send a messenger for him; but long before she reached the bottom of the flight she changed her mind and ascended the broad stairs again.

Two or three times she took up a pen and drew paper and portfolio before her, thinking to write and break the news.

She began—“My dear Mr. Stondon,” and tore that up; then she commenced, “Dear Basil,” and tried to go on and tell him of the disaster that had happened.

But it would not do. When a person thinks, words flow like water; when he writes, they freeze on the paper; and Phemie tore up that epistle likewise.

Then she went and looked at the child—at the glory of golden hair—at the round smooth cheeks—at the body which had been so full of life and health but a few hours before. He had been a troublesome imp when living—a restless, noisy, daring, unmanageable boy; but he was quiet enough now. He had been wont to push “Fairy” away from Phemie’s side, and to strike Phemie when she took his sister up in her arms and comforted her. There was not a dress in Mrs. Stondon’s wardrobe but bore testimony to the strength of Master Harry’s hands, but the child was quiet enough now; and when Phemie looked upon all that remained of Basil’s son—when she felt what he would feel when he came to look upon his dead also, she fell on her knees beside the boy, and her heart seemed to cry in spite of her own desire—“How will he bear it! how will he ever endure this sight!”

Any one entering that room would have imagined Phemie to be praying, as kneeling on the floor she remained with her arms stretched over the snowy sheet, and her head resting upon them; but in reality Phemie was not praying—she was thinking—going over the weary past—traversing the old roads over again—wondering when the end would come, and what the end would be.

As she had suffered, was he to suffer? As she had wept, was he to weep? Had the hour for settlement come at last, and was this part of his temporal wages?

Sin! He had sinned, and while Phemie knelt there in the gathering darkness she recited to herself that story out of The Book which begins,—

“There were two men in one city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up.”

She never knew why that pathetic tale—so terribly pathetic that the sinner’s sin is almost forgotten in the sinner’s misery and humility—should come back to her memory then.

Was it for the sins of the father that the child which had been born unto Basil, and become to him as the very apple of his eye, was taken away thus—the fruit of his body for the sin of his soul.

Was it? Phemie had enough of the old Covenanting spirit in her religion to say, in answer to her own question, “Lord, it is just;” and yet her softer, weaker, human nature trembled to think of that inexorable justice which seemed never to forget to remember sin—which seemed never weary of awarding punishment.

“O God, let me bear—let me;” and Phemie prayed at last. All the dross had been taken out of her nature, and I think she was pure and unselfish at that moment as the angels in heaven. “Punish him no further—but let me bear all;” and then she bethought her of the words of Solomon the son of David.

“If they sin against Thee (for there is no man that sinneth not), and Thou be angry with them, and deliver them to the enemy; yet if they bethink themselves and repent, and make supplication, saying,—We have done perversely; we have committed wickedness: Then hear Thou in Heaven, and forgive the sin of Thy people.”

“Hear, O Lord,” Phemie added, and her tears fell hot and fast. “Hear and pity, and enable him to bear this trouble Thou hast laid upon him.”

“Who will tell Basil?” she marvelled, as she rose from the ground—“who?” And she wished her uncle were with her, feeling that he perhaps might have been the best bearer of bad tidings possible to find under the circumstances.

“I can telegraph for him at any rate,” she considered, and the idea gave her immediate relief.

He would advise and assist. There were a dozen things he could see to, and his presence would be a restraint—a man’s presence always was.

Phemie decided to send for him, and half-an-hour afterwards one of the Marshland servants was galloping to Disley in order to despatch her telegram.

He had not been gone ten minutes, however, before Georgina spoke.

“Is it true?” she said, faintly; and Phemie answered, “It is true.”

“He is dead, then?” and Mrs. Stondon replied, “Everything that could be done was done; but he never moved after the horse kicked him.”

There ensued a silence; then the wife uttered her husband’s name.

“Shall I write to him?” asked Phemie. “I have not done so till I heard what your wishes were.”

“You must go to him,” was the reply.

“Go—I—” repeated Phemie.

“Yes, he will never come back if you do not—never; and you owe it to me,” went on the wretched woman, “to do what I ask. I told you this morning I had forgiven you long ago, but it was not the truth. I thought it was then; but I must have been mistaken. If you go, and bring him back, and keep him from cursing me, I will forgive you—I will kiss the ground you walk on—I will love you as I have hated you. Go!”

“What shall I say to him?” asked Mrs. Stondon.

“What you like. You used to be able to wind him round your finger, try your power now. Go, go, for God’s sake, before he hears about it from any other person—go.”

Phemie rose and stood irresolute, then—“It is not fitting I should do this thing,” she said. “I will write to him if you like, or I will telegraph to my uncle to go to him direct, but you ask too much of me, Georgina, you do indeed. Basil is certain to return to see his child, and then you can tell him about—about—the accident. I cannot interfere between man and wife.”

“Cannot you?—give me the medicine, or wine, or water, or something; and let me speak out my mind. Have you never interfered between us?” she went on, after swallowing the wine Phemie poured out for her. “Have I not felt you stepping between us every hour since my marriage. Did you not lay it on him as a curse—that he should never love any one as he loved you. Did not you, and has not the curse stuck? Has he ever loved another since—has he ever loved me?” and the unloved wife broke out into a fit of such passionate weeping as took Phemie totally by surprise.

“Dear Georgina,” she began soothingly, but the other interrupted her with—“You need not try to smooth the matter over; if it had not been for you he might have loved me (I have been lying thinking over it all while you were out of the room), but as it was, he never loved me, and he will hate me now. He will say I did it, and perhaps he will say true. Whatever he wished Harry not to do I encouraged Harry to do, and now—and now—he will never speak to me again; he never will.”

“He will not be so cruel, so unmanly,” Phemie said; but Georgina answered, “Ah! you do not know Basil Stondon, he can be both when he likes,” and she buried her face in the pillows, and sobbed aloud.

“I will go to him,” Phemie murmured; her soul travelled back at that instant over the years, to the days when Basil had been cruel and unmanly towards her, and she accepted the errand which was now put upon her, as she would any other that had arisen out of the mad foolishness of that wretchedly happy time. “If I were to telegraph though to him to return, as Harry was ill, and then break it to him on his return, would it not do as well as my going?”

“The people at the station would tell him.”

“But if I met him at the station.”

“He would hear about it on the line.”

It was thus Georgina answered every argument, and at length, worn out by her importunity, Phemie yielded, and was about leaving the room to make the needful arrangements for her departure, when she was stopped once more.

“Whom were you thinking of taking with you,” asked Georgina.

“Either Harris or Marshall,” was the reply. “Harris, if you could spare him, would be the best.”

“Take neither,” was the reply; “Basil would get the truth from them.”

“And do you absolutely wish me to travel to a strange place by myself.”

“Yes—to serve me—to do me such a kindness,” and she took Phemie’s hand and kissed it humbly.

Within an hour Mrs. Stondon drove out of the gates of Marshlands, and started, all alone, to find Basil. Less than most women of the present day had she ever been thrown on her own resources, and the journey which no woman would have regarded as a pleasant one, seemed formidable in the extreme to her. All night she travelled on main lines or cross lines; now the compartment she occupied was shunted on one side at a junction, again she had to get out at some hitherto unheard of station and change carriages, in order to reach her destination, which was a little out-of-the-way village in Yorkshire, where she arrived cold and stiff and weary, next morning at nine o’clock.

Quarry Moor boasted neither hotel nor station, nor town nor village. Passengers who desired to alight there, communicated their wishes to the guard at the previous stopping place; and accordingly, Phemie found herself dropped at a gate, without a house in sight, or a living being to speak to, except the man who made signals that passengers were to be taken up, and who resided during business hours in a wooden box beside the line.

With some difficulty Phemie made this individual understand her position, and after a little hesitation, he gave her what probably might be regarded as sound advice.

In a wonderful accent he said, “she had better go straight on till she came to Mr. Urkirs’ farm, and if you tell him what you want, happen he will spare one of his labourers to take your message over to Goresby Manor.”

Very patiently Phemie plodded on, with the moor stretching to right and left, the straight unfenced road before her, and the cold grey sky above. It did not seem to her that it was really she, Phemie Stondon, who was walking all by herself through Yorkshire; who had been travelling by night till she was frozen and stupefied; the whole performance appeared so like part of a dream, that she had to stop occasionally to realise she was hundreds of miles from her own home, and half way across Quarry Moor, on her way to tell Basil of his son’s death.

On her arrival at the farm, Phemie found Mr. Urkirs out, but Mrs. Urkirs received the stranger very graciously, and at once promised to send one of the men over to Goresby.

“Mr. Goresby is our landlord,” she explained, “and very likely the gentleman you want is one I saw riding past here with him yesterday. If you would like to go on, William shall put the horse in the chaise and drive you over—but perhaps you would not——”

Mrs. Urkirs stopped; the thought in her mind was—perhaps the lady might not care to drive in a chaise with William for charioteer, but there was a look in Phemie’s face that told the worthy woman she would have gone in a wheelbarrow had any necessity existed for her doing so.

“I need not go on,” Phemie answered, however. “If you would allow me to remain here, I should much prefer doing so. Can you let me write a note to Mr. Stondon. He may not understand a verbal message.”

Considering the present price of paper, considering the millions of steel pens that are manufactured, and the rivers of ink which flow annually out of London, it is wonderful to consider that there are hundreds of thousands of houses in the United Kingdom where a letter never seems to be written, where ink might be made of attar of roses, and pens sold at a guinea a piece, judging from the specimens of each which are presented for a visitor’s benefit.

Even in the midst of her sorrow and anxiety, Phemie could not help some idea of this sort passing through her mind.

Mrs. Urkirs brought her first a quarter of a sheet of letter paper, then a bit of blotting paper about an inch and a-half square, then one of those penny stone ink bottles which were invented for the confusion of mankind, together with an old steel pen—which she rubbed “soft,” as she said, on the hearthstone—and a quill that had apparently been in use for a couple or so of generations.

Out of these materials Phemie constructed her epistle. It seemed easier to write in the lonely farm-house than it had done at Marshlands—besides, she had no time to lose, no paper to waste; as the words were set down so they had to stand.

“Dear Basil,” she began, and she wrote closely that she might not run short of space. “Dear Basil, I have come all this way at Georgina’s request to say Harry is very ill, and to beg you to return home with me at once. I entreat of you not to let anything prevent your coming. Mrs. Urkirs kindly allows me to remain here till the messenger returns. I have directed him, if you are not at the Manor, to follow and give this to you.

It was the first letter she had ever written to Basil, and while she folded it up she thought about that fact.

After William had mounted and departed she still went on thinking, and sate by the fire considering how strange it was she never should have written to him before—that no necessity had arisen through all the years of their acquaintance for her to send him even the merest line. How wonderful it was that on her should devolve the duty of making the man she loved wretched!

“I do not know how I shall ever tell him,” she thought. “I do not.”

“And the child is very ill, ma’am, you say,” remarked Mrs. Urkirs at this juncture.

“He is dangerously ill,” answered Phemie.

“And what a journey it was for you,” went on the farmer’s wife, who—the excitement of looking up writing materials and of despatching William over—was beginning to think the business odd.

“A fearful journey,” was the reply, and Mrs. Stondon shivered.

“Could no person have come but you, ma’am,” was the next question.

“His mother thought not,” answered Phemie.

“You are the gentleman’s sister, I suppose,” suggested Mrs. Urkirs, after a pause, devoted to considering how she could possibly get at the bottom of the mystery.

“No,” Phemie said; “I am only a very distant relative of Mr. Stondon,” and she rose as she spoke and leaned her head against the stone mantelshelf, and thought how she could best stop the woman’s questions.

“Mrs. Stondon had a very special reason for wishing me to carry the message instead of entrusting it to a servant,” she began at last. “I will tell you what that reason was before I go, but I cannot do so until after I have spoken to Mr. Stondon.”

From that moment the two got on admirably. They talked about farming, about Yorkshire, about children, about London, about Norfolk, about Marshlands, about every conceivable topic, including the health of Mr. Urkirs and his “one fault,” as his wife styled it, namely a disinclination to leave a “drain of spirits in a bottle.”

Phemie had gone in a little for model farming at Roundwood, and was able to discourse gravely concerning stock and milch cows, soils and rotations.

The lessons she had learned among the hills were applied practically to the lands in Sussex, and Mrs. Urkirs told her husband subsequently that, to be a lady, Mrs. Stondon knew more about cropping than any woman she had ever met with.

Mrs. Stondon, on her part, was thinking all the time they conversed, of Basil’s child and the Hill Farm. Could she really ever have lived in a farm-house? Was it true that Basil’s boy was dead? In a vague kind of way she began to wonder whether, when he and she returned to Marshlands, they might not find it was all a mistake—that the doctor had done something—that Harry would yet be restored. Mercifully, death, when we are away from it, is hard to realise; till the first force of the blow is almost expended we never seem quite to lose hope; and thus it was that Phemie had to rouse herself occasionally in order to remember that the life was gone past recovery—that Basil could never hear Harry’s voice again—that it was to his dead not to his sick she had come to summon him.

“I wonder how soon your man can return,” she said at last.

“Well, ma’am, it depends on whether he would have only to go to Goresby or further. If Mr. Stondon was at the Manor he might—— But here is the gentleman himself,” she added, as Basil came galloping along the road and up to the farm, where, flinging his bridle to one of the labourers, he threw himself from his horse and came hurriedly into the house.

“What is the matter with Harry?” were the first words he spoke.

“He has met with an accident,” answered Phemie, while Mrs. Urkirs discreetly withdrew.

“How—when—where?” he persisted.

“Yesterday; somehow in the stable-yard.”

He muttered an oath, and took a turn up and down the farm kitchen before he broke out—

“Weren’t there enough of you about the house to have kept him out of harm’s way. Sometimes I cannot think what women were sent into the world for at all.”

She did not answer him. She knew what he did not know, and it kept her tongue quiet, otherwise Phemie was not the one to have endured such a speech quietly.

Her silence had its effect, however, for he said next moment—

“I beg your pardon; of course I was not thinking of you, but of my wife.”

“Say what you like to me,” Phemie replied, “but spare your wife. She has suffered enough; she is very seriously ill.”

In answer to which appeal Basil said something under his breath, to the effect that she could sham illness when it suited her purpose, and impose on doctors as she had once imposed on him.

“She is not shamming now, at any rate,” Phemie answered, and Basil continued his walk.

“Is he badly hurt?” he began again, after a pause.

“I am afraid so.”

“Is he in danger?”

“He is.”

“Was he insensible?”

“Yes; he had not spoken when I left.”

“And why did you leave him? Why could you not have sent one of the servants?”

“Because I know everything that could be done for him would be done, and I wished you to return to Marshlands immediately. I wanted to telegraph, but Georgina would not hear of it; so I started to find you as soon as possible.”

“You have travelled all night then?”

“Yes; I arrived here at nine o’clock this morning.”

“You must be very tired,” and he came up to where she stood and looked in her face.

“If travelling for a year could do you or yours any good, Basil, I should not mind being tired!” she exclaimed, and her eyes filled with tears, to remember nothing she could do might be of any use now, to him or his.

He remained silent for an instant; but then, putting out his hand, he touched hers, and said, piteously—

“What a fool I was, Phemie!—oh, what a fool!”

“Do not be one now then, Basil,” she answered, and she drew her hand away from his and stepped back a pace or two.

“When does the train start?” she asked, and the question brought Basil to his senses.

“We have not much time to spare,” he said; “there is a train at one o’clock. If we catch that we can then get a special once we reach the main line. But how are you to get over to the station? How did you come here?”

“I walked,” she answered, “but Mrs. Urkirs will allow one of her men to drive me back, I know.” And so it was settled that they should start immediately, and while Basil went out to speak about putting in the horse, Phemie talked to Mrs. Urkirs, and with that individual’s assistance equipped herself for the journey.

When everything had been prepared for their departure; when Mrs. Stondon, duly wrapped up, was seated in Mr. Urkirs’ light cart; when Basil was mounted, and the boy whom he meant to take charge of his horse to Goresby had nestled down into the body of the vehicle, behind Phemie and the driver, the former stooped over the wheel and whispered to Mrs. Urkirs—who had come out to see that the rug was so disposed as to keep her visitor’s dress from being splashed—stooped and whispered—

“The child is dead, and I want to break it to him gently as we go home.”

“I would rather she had the breaking of it to him than I,” remarked Mr. Goresby when Mrs. Urkirs, an hour subsequently, communicated to that gentleman the piece of information she had gained.

Mr. Goresby was a fresh, hearty, middle-aged squire, of the men-who-have-no-nonsense-about-them stamp, and he did feel most grievously sorry to hear of the misfortune that had fallen on his friend.

“Was this Mrs. Stondon a young woman?” he asked—standing beside the door of the farm-house, with his arm through his horse’s bridle, and his foot keeping turning—turning a loose stone as he spoke.

“Over thirty, I should think, sir,” was the reply. “Tall and stately-looking, and proud, seemingly, till you came to speak to her, but then she was just as pleasant and homely as yourself. She sat there in that corner by the fire, and cried when she talked about the child as she might if it had been one of her own. It was wonderful of her coming all this way by herself; there are few ladies, I am thinking, would have done it.”

“You are right there, Mrs. Urkirs,” answered the squire, and he mounted his hack and rode leisurely home to Goresby Manor, wishing to himself he had seen Phemie, and marvelling whether she was the former love he had once heard the mistress of Marshlands twitting her husband concerning.

“I suppose there is a woman at the bottom of every misfortune that happens to a man, if we could only search deep enough,” decided Mr. Goresby, who, being a bachelor, had always felt an intense curiosity to know the ins and outs of whatever love affair it was in Basil Stondon’s past which had, as he mentally rounded the sentence, “put his life all wrong.”